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- Title
"The Worse Element": Black Sex Workers, White Slavery, and Sexual Policing in San Diego.
- Authors
Carney, Christina
- Abstract
This article offers an example of how the convergence of discourses on "white slavery" and social hygiene led to the disproportionate criminalization, displacement, and detention of Black sex workers by authorities in early twentieth-century San Diego. The city's large military presence, proximity to the US-Mexico border, and interracial sociality (between white, immigrant, and nonwhite communities) led to the regulation of its interracial sex tourism industry. As the city prepared for its first major military project, the Panama-California Exposition of 1915, public health officials demolished tenement housing for plumbing violations and followed with the compulsory quarantining of sex workers, couched in concerns about venereal disease. The sexual policing of Black sex workers by local, state, and military authorities was underpinned by discourses that imagined Black women as risks to public health and white women's virtue in the US-Mexico border town.
- Subjects
SAN Diego (Calif.); SEX workers; HUMAN trafficking; SEX work; SEXUAL health
- Publication
Radical History Review, 2024, Vol 2024, Issue 149, p133
- ISSN
0163-6545
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1215/01636545-11027522